Pierogies Recipe

I am from Pennsylvania, where the pierogie is handmade and an art form. When I moved to the midwest, I found that most people had never heard of a pierogie and the frozen kinds did not cut it. I found a wonderful website home.comcast.
Read morenet/dyrgcmn/pierogi. Pierogies are traditionally filled with potao, but can be filled with cabbage, meat, or fruit. This is a day long process, as one batch will give you about 15-20 pierogi, depending on your size. I invited my daughter and two friends to help and we had a pierogi party, and made several batches (about 100). I sealed them and stored them in the freezer, so I can use them later. Pierogies are boiled until they float and then sauted quickly in butter, garlic, mushrooms and onions. Serve with your main course and a glass of red wine. Enjoy! See less

How to make it

Cook and mash the potatoes, with no milk added. You can season the potatoes to taste, using the parsley, thyme, salt, and pepper.

Roast and then mince the onions, adding the garlic and the pesto.

Shred up the cabbage and saute in butter.

Set all of these ingredients aside in seperate bowls and begin work on your dough.

Combine the flour, eggs and salt together and then slowly work in the water.

The dough is quite sticky and will not require a lot of kneading, otherwise it becomes overworked.

Place dough under an inverted bowl or under a cloth for 1/2 hour.

Coat your roller and work surface with flour and keep a small bowl of flour beside you as you roll ou the dough. It is quite sticky. I took the intial ball and cut it in half to make two small balls. I then rolled each smaller ball out. The desired consistency is 1/16'"thick. A pasta machine was recommended for this, but I don't have one, so I rolled mine by hand.

When the dough is completely rolled out, start spooning your filling ingredients on one of the dough sheets in small flat piles. Take into account your pierogi making tool (I used a cookie cutter) for how much filling and how close you can set each small pile. Potatoes come first, then cabbage, and then onion.

When you are done putting your filling piles on your one sheet of dough, cover it with the other sheet of dough - like you are making a sandwich.

Cut out your pierogies and then seal the edges carefully pinching them shut. You should get around 20 pirogies per sheet. Traditional pierogi are half moon shaped, but we found when using the round cookie cutter, we would loose all of the filling when we tried to cut them in half. You could try doing this by hand, but I think unless you are an experienced pasta maker, it would take forever.

Put the finished pirogies in a floured container until you have reapeated the pierogi making steps and all of your dough and filling is gone. NOTE: We found we had to make three additional batches of dough to match the amount of filling we had.

When you are done, put the pierogi in food sealer bags in small batches, label, and freeze.

Cooking: Pierogies are usually boiled until they float and then sauteed in butter, onions, minced garlic, and mushrooms. Dried Shitake mushrooms, rehydrated, and sauteed in the pan with the some of water used to rehydrate works wonderfully in this presentation. You can deep fry them, or just saute them period. The dough is tender and will tear easily, so a small amount of handling is all that is necessary.

Bookmarked!! I live in upstate NY where it is a mostly Italian and Polish. Pierogies are just a wonderful invention, but I never ever tried to make them. I will now. I got the saurkraut and kielbasa thing down, but need to try this. Thanks. Dan

I'm from the South and when I saw these in the grocery--I didn't know what they were! I bought some frozen ones & the checkout clerk told me how to fix them--I'll try the REAL thing--sounds wonderful! Thank you!

We love pierogis. My grandma P. made them all the time. Your photos are awesome and quite beautiful. A true labor of love. Have you ever done the prune filling with sugared buttered bread crumbs? G. Plaza always made it for our dessert pierogi. They were awesome.

What a wonderful post, angel - these are absolutely fantastic...great pictures, great recipe - can't wait to actually try these at home. There are many eastern european in this area, so I can find peirogies easily enough, but your homemade version looks far superior, and tastes better, I'm sure! Thanks for sharing your recipe...Krum (I love these traditional, passed down, family recipes!!)